Endpoint Management Community Blog

Ever Wondered if Altiris Agent Check Point Recovery Works Over a Reboot? It Sure Does.

Ludovic Ferre | 12 Jan 2010 | 0 comments

Here's a quick test I ran this morning for a colleague who need to check if the feature works upon computer reboot (which for the agent is the same as a service stop / start event pair).

So here's the test I conduct:

Picked up the 4 biggest packages from my PMS update directories
Created a single package with 900+ MiB from 4 files
Created a SWD Task and assigned it to my test machine
Update the client config on the test machine
Disable the NIC after the download started
Enabled the NIC and forced the download restart (couldn't wait 4 minutes ;)
Stopped the Altiris Agent
Started the Altiris Agent
Repeated the above 2 steps

And the results are visible here:

...

Everything Search Engine

erikw | 28 Dec 2009 | 1 comment

With the current large disks it is a huge task if you need to find something. I found a very cool tool that really helps.

"Everything" is an administrative tool that locates files and folders by filename instantly for Windows.
Unlike Windows search "Everything" initially displays every file and folder on your computer (hence the name "Everything").
You type in a search filter to limit what files and folders are displayed.

"Everything" only uses file and folder names and generally takes a few seconds to build it's database.
A fresh install of Windows XP SP2 (about 20,000 files) will take about 1 second to index.
1,000,000 files will take about 1 minute.

Best of all, It is freeware. If you use it in a professional environment and you like it, you could consider a donation to the developer.

http://www.voidtools.com/

Altiris UK User Group Event: 20th January 2010

ianatkin | 17 Dec 2009 | 0 comments

Altiris UK User Group Event: Windows 7 and Altiris

We would like to invite you to the second Altiris UK User Group event. The User Group is still very new but the first event was a great success and there is still a great need for Altiris users to communicate with one another.

When: 20th January 2010, 2.45pm – 5.00pm

Where: Mitsubishi UFJ Securities International PLC, 6 Broadgate, London, EC2M 2AA

What: A chance to meet other Altiris users and share experiences as well as learn from Symantec experts about how Altiris assists with Windows 7 migrations.

Agenda:

2.45 – 3.00pm: Registration and tea/coffee
3.00 – 3.45pm: “7 Steps to Windows 7 migration” presentation by Greg Slade, Altiris Regional Product Manager
3.45 – 4.00pm...

What's The Deal with File Registration?

Superfreak3 | 17 Dec 2009 | 0 comments

The biggest issue I've dealt with over the years is getting files to register properly via install. I've used various authoring tools (mostly big name products) and I've had the same problem(s) with each - some more frequent than others.

For the most part, you add a file to your project/template and the information is scanned. It never fails though, from release to release, I get one or two .dll's that just aren't getting registered. I look in my project and it looks as though the registration stuff is there, but app errors so something not getting scanned/included properly.

I also noticed recently that when I pull an assembly into a template, it appears that registry information does get scanned for it. However, I think its missing some 'stuff' that would be registered via RegAsm. Being so busy since being called back from a layoff, I haven't been able to take registry snapshots to see what information is missing.

Then...

Security Configuration Checklist for Intel vPro Technology

Terry Cutler | 16 Dec 2009 | 0 comments

In the August 2009 timeframe, a document was posted to help educate IT administrators on the most secure use of Intel vPro technology-based desktops and laptops. The document provides greater insights to the technology, platform architecture, services provided, security recommendations, and so forth. The document was written from a platform technology viewpoint, thus direct correlations or insights to deployment in a Symantec environment were not provided.

The document is over 60pages long and about 29.5MB in size. The material was original posted as a reference for security focused administrators.

The material is available at http://www.vproexpert.com/MC334/security-configuration-checklist-rev2.zip

If specific questions about how to implement the security features using a Symantec\Altiris environment - items posted in this community...

How to get a quick count of active machines on a client facing NS?

Ludovic Ferre | 15 Dec 2009 | 5 comments

There is a fuzzy area between the count of managed machines in a Notification Server and the count of active machines.

First when is a managed machine considered as active or inactive? This can be defined and interpreted in many different ways based on the nature of one's business, whether it is fast changing or strictly controlled etc.

The SQL query below is not going to answer this question, but can serve as a starting point (you could add event request on the filter such as last basic inventory received or last client policy request etc):


use altiris

select count (*), ((DATENAME(Year,DataLastChangedDate)) + ' ' + (DATENAME(Month,DataLastChangedDate))) as 'Month'
  from (
			select ResourceGuid, Max(DataLastChangedDate) as 'DataLastChangedDate'
			  from ItemResource ir
			  join ResourceUpdateSummary rus
				on ir.guid = rus.resourceguid
			 where IsManaged = 1
			 group by resourceguid
		) t
 where datalastchangeddate > DATEADD(Month,- 3,GETDATE...

Asset Management and Text File Encoding: ANSI and UTF8 and More

Ludovic Ferre | 14 Dec 2009 | 1 comment

Text file encoding is one big challenge in modern computing.

Why? Because the various files encoding that exist to represent text data can vary greatly, based on the system type it was created on (Unix versus Windows versus Mac), based on the processor type (big-endians versus little-endians, which is relates to how the processor read data from memory) and based on language settings and character sets (unicode, ascii etc).

Here is a screen shot from my favorite text file editor on Windows (Notepad ++ which is a free and open source software) showing the various file encoding options available nowadays:

This clearly illustrates that...

{CWoC} Running some base performance analysis on the C and C# prototypes, stunning results!

Ludovic Ferre | 14 Dec 2009 | 1 comment

Friday evening.

I still have an outstanding case with various IIS related issues however I'm glad the week end has come. This way I can progress my {CWoc} project and do a little bit of coding.

I only had a couple of evening to work on some high level design consideration (on data structures to store statistics) and low level tid-bits. Passing a few small hurdles (getting started file file handling in C) I got around to create a native (x64) program to read files lines by lines in chunks of 1024 bytes. The C# code reads the entire line at a once and was very easy to do (if think the prototype was working last week-end already).

So both programs are capable of handling the command line pre-defined (with minor edits on the arguments), and both actually can parse a file to count the number of bytes read and give out a line count.

So I thought I'd run some base line tests to check if C is really much more efficient than high level languages like C...

AutoIt v3

B_Raj | 10 Dec 2009 | 5 comments

AutoIt continues to be FREE !!

AutoIt v3 is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks in a way not possible or reliable with other languages (e.g. VBScript and SendKeys). AutoIt is also very small, self-contained and will run on all versions of Windows out-of-the-box with no annoying “runtimes” required!

AutoIt was initially designed for PC “roll out” situations to reliably automate and configure thousands of PCs. Over time it has become a powerful language that supports complex expressions, user functions, loops and everything else that veteran scripters would expect.

Features:

Easy to learn BASIC-like syntax
Simulate keystrokes and mouse movements
Manipulate windows and processes

Connect Winter of Code {CWoC} or Open sourcing my existing NS tools and preparing to build new ones

Ludovic Ferre | 05 Dec 2009 | 0 comments

on { Collaboration, community & open source -> CWoC }

I spent some times thinking about tools and Notification Server, specially with new requirement to fill some gaps in analysis tools (for example IIS log files contain a great deal of info that can't be analyzed with standard log analyzers) but I have not done anything about this in the last year or so. Possibly due to a falling out between me and Microsoft Visual Studio (and also because newly born Sophie deserved all my love and attention).

I got over it (the VS stuff, Sophie still gets the love and attention), and found a new set of friends: the c# compiler on Windows (csc.exe) and Mono on Linux (a port of the Common Language Infrastructure ECMA standard open sourced by Novell).

With the addition of Google Code project hosting this is me set for a "Connect Winter of Code" {CWoC} (in opposition to Google SoC :D). I think it actually make sense to...

Endpoint Management Community Blog

Altiris UK User Group Event: Windows 7 and Altiris

on { Collaboration, community & open source -> CWoC }

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